Just as we teeter on the edge of a stock market looming towards falling below 10,000, a report comes along and up go the numbers, and again the fall that the collapsniks tout is around the corner is avoided.  Our system has bought itself more time and demonstrated that even with so many negative signs out there, no one really knows what is keeping our economy together.  Then, those of us with jobs continue on as before.  Prices around us increase just a little while our wages stagnate, just a little.  The jobless report said that our numbers went down – the unemployed are 6000 fewer than last month.  Still, at about 400,000 people, 6000 is well within a range of numerical error rather than a mark of achievement of the ObaClintoma government.  NPR (National Propaganda [by secret] Republicans] radio claims in their Market Watch programe that we may never again see an unemployment rate below 5%.  The reason?  We have lost our manufacturing base and employers just don’t need as many Americans as we currently are birthing.  What they don’t say is that while more and more will be unemployed, the money is still out there to put people to work – the top 1% of our nation sits on it.  This is the money many of us will never see but that drops in and out of the stock market or is moved overseas (after all, Sam’s Club profits for this quarter were attributed to foreign profits).  So, the stock market is disconnected from the rest of the economy as you and I live it on a daily why-is-this-bagel-five-dollars kind of way.  The Change the doomsters claim is not around the corner, it is already here.  Creeping like kudzu, if kudzu actually moved slowly….

One corner that we can see this creeping crud is in the dead malls.  The vacant stores that are popping up all over like ghost ship Starbucks.  Another is the almost SOVIET way that we are drugging out citizens, especially our youngest and newest members – children.  The SOVIET Union would send those who did not believe in [the SOVIET] version of communism to mental institutions.  They got what was then considered therapy.  Our wise American and Western commentators claimed this was used as part of political re-education camps and to break dissent.  Today, we are wiser.  Our Americapitalism of consumption without consequences, private profits and public debts has to be believed or we are told we are depressed, have ADD, or ADHD or something new that they have created synthetic Ibogaine to allow us to survive in this Children Of Men world we are fast creating for ourselves.  In the NYT (Notes for Yuppies Transcribed) today there is an article about the side effects of drugging younger and younger children into their seats so they can stay hour after hour in prison-like schools without even the respite of the screaming mimi lunch period or recess (mom, dad, what is recess?) to shake off the energy that was once considered natural – but that was back in the bad old days where children were considered a blessing rather than an appliance we must create when we are settled in our careers our hair gray and our sex organs are no longer viable.  Of the many comments exclaiming horror at the drugging of our children, one made the connection to the heart of the issue – our current and perhaps future economy.  It isn’t parents or Kidsthesedays, but our hollow economy that forces us to conform (hey, what about diversity????) all children to fit into one neat mold.  The college educated innovator who will innovate her way out of… being eaten by the Chinese Powerhouse of the East.  The last paragraph was written better than the musing of this author is posted in its entirety.

 And what truly is wrong with an average or below-average student? Why does everyone need to get A’s and be the model of Stepford-like perfection? Is it because as a society we have created a place where only the top academic performers with laser-like attention and social grace can be productive participants? We have downsized and rightsized and off-shored ourselves into an existence where only the best and brightest have the remotest chance at a prosperous future, and we are getting to the point where we don’t even have the entry and middle level jobs for these people either. I think that all of these things have contributed to our panicked frenzy if our 18 month old is cranky. When will we wake up and realize that a functioning society can only truly prosper when it makes a place in it for all of its members at all the varying levels of abilities that that implies. Just because a child does fit the idea of what we have put forth as the model child means that we need to take dynamite to them to attempt to remold them into that idyllic little person that they need to be to have a chance in our world. We are going to kill individualism and kill creativity. We are going to destroy what it was to just be in the world without the pressures of hitting your mark. 

Alessandro Rosa

NYC